Quirks Don’t Explain Rage at Anaheim Motel

There are plenty of clues who Anthony “Tony” Allen was.

They are stuffed and piled in every inch of his tiny cinder-block house, a lifetime of documents, books and personal notes. They are in the stacks of magazines about cats, money, the IRS and guns. They are scattered among the worn maps of dozens of U.S. cities. They are in every postcard that his dentist sent for his birthday for the past 17 years. They are in the weights he lifted in his kitchen.

But the clues hardly explain what investigators from at least four agencies in two states want to know about Allen, an unemployed electrician. They don’t say why he climbed into his white Ford pickup this summer and left town without a word. Or why he strung electrical wires around his windows and doors to electrocute anyone who entered.

They certainly don’t indicate what brought Allen, 50, to a motel room in Anaheim just over a week ago. Six quiet days at the Calico Motel on Beach Boulevard exploded Sunday when Allen engaged police in a 14-hour standoff. After firing rounds at SWAT officers with an assault rifle, tossing homemade hand grenades off the balcony and daring police to “come in and get me,” one of Allen’s own bombs went off in his hand.

He died in Room #17, wearing military camouflage fatigues, heavy boots and a gas mask. He was surrounded by an arsenal that rivaled any SWAT team’s. It was a collection of his favorites, nearly 30 weapons and 1,000 rounds of ammunition.

Police were so disturbed by Allen’s intimacy with war weapons that they sent two detectives here Tuesday, hoping to get answers in Allen’s hometown.

“There is too much we don’t know about this whole thing,” Anaheim Police Sgt. Harold Mittman said. “This was not your average call-out . . . this guy meant business. We won’t feel better until we get a better picture of who he was.”

But Allen was a stranger even here, in the rural neighborhood southwest of Albuquerque where he had rented a one-bedroom house for 12 years.

He never had guests or talked to his landlord, who lives just steps away from Allen’s unit. In fact, Nester Loc said he stepped foot inside the moldy rental for the first time this week, after Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department officials arrived and told him Allen was dead.

“He never asked for us to fix anything in here,” Loc said, examining a row of Playboy calendars dating back to 1960, which Allen had tacked to a wall. Loc lifted a heavy orange curtain from the front window, a move that released a cloud of dust into the kitchen.

“He was mysterious that way. He didn’t like people around too much, and I thought that was a little off.”

Loc, who has two other tenants in separate units on his corner lot, said Allen ignored his neighbors and slipped the $200 rent check under Loc’s front door in the middle of the night. He tended to a vegetable garden in front of his front porch, producing “huge tomatoes and onions” but never offered to share, Loc said.

This year, Allen neglected the garden and let the wild grass on his side of the yard grow taller than his own 6-foot frame, neighbors said. They often spotted him doing pull-ups from a bar he installed on his porch, and inverted sit-ups from a weight bench he positioned beside the front door.

“He was in great shape,” said Alfonso Loc, the landlord’s brother. “He was huge. You could hear him grunting out there for hours.”

Just as neighbors said they never, ever, saw Allen with another person, deputies with the Orange County coroner’s office have been unable to find any relatives of the former Army serviceman. A search for family members in Allen’s native Michigan turned up nothing, officials said. They found no evidence that he ever married.

He attended a Catholic high school in St. Clair Shores, Mich., where he was a top student who capitalized on his large frame in the boxing ring, former classmates said Tuesday. Even then, in 1965, Allen displayed an infatuation with military weapons and “covert tactics,” said Bobbie Kirsch, who shared a physics class with Allen.

“Everyone called him ‘Jungle Man’ because he was so into all of that war stuff,” Kirsch said. “And he was extremely serious about his studies, I remember that.”

Allen enlisted in the military in 1966, earning several medals and an award for becoming a “Master Speed Reader,” according to documents he saved at his house. When his tour ended three years later, he earned a diploma in industrial electricity from a vocational school and worked on various construction projects in New Mexico.

“He’d be home for a few weeks and then pick up and leave for a few,” said Terry Spath, a former neighbor. “Then the work started to slow, but he would still leave. I have no idea where he went. He never said.”

Anaheim Police Sgt. Joe Vargas said receipts found in his room at the Calico Motel showed he had been traveling throughout the West during the past three months, and had returned home infrequently. They have yet to discern the motive for his wandering, however.

“We’re trying to retrace his steps,” Vargas said. “We’re trying to answer a lot of questions a lot of people are asking. We hoped it would be easy--some kind of manifesto written down.”

Allen’s day of violence began about 6:30 Sunday morning, when he opened fire outside a Circle K convenience store. A clerk, Jonathan Ed Sumey, 35, of Anaheim, was hit in the head by a bullet fragment.

Sumey improved from critical to guarded condition Tuesday at the intensive-care unit of UCI Medical Center in Orange, a nursing supervisor said.

Police still have no idea what brought Allen to Anaheim. One mysterious link was a faded newspaper obituary tacked to a wall in his home. The 1982 clipping reported the death in Anaheim of a man known as “The Great Impostor.”

Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr., profiled in a book and in a movie starring Tony Curtis, had posed as a combat surgeon, a deputy prison warden, a monk, a college dean, a psychology professor and a high school French and Latin teacher during his lifetime.

Times staff writer Steve Carney contributed to this report.